Image of Jason Strickler's MFA exhibition at Claremont Graduate Institute's East Gallery or Peggy Phelps Gallery.

This manuscript is comprised of a selection of poems written during my time as a student in the creative writing MFA program at Georgia State University. These are lyric/narrative poems arranged loosely according to subject matter – family, spiritual yearning/mystery.

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the locked Download file link and fill out the appropriate web form. / MFA Thesis: Holding Pattern, by A.J. Odasso. 35 pages of new poetry submitted in partial fulfillment of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (Poetry), academic year 2015-2016. / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z

My work explores the gray area and the shifting border between "us" and "other." It investigates the helplessness and the submissiveness on both sides of this spectrum and one's passivity that makes the "pain of others" inevitable. Moreover, it examines the individual and collective experiences of guilt and complicity in relation to world events. I am interested in the selective and repressed memories of individuals and nations, the reluctance to look and the ability to forget.

My work focuses on the fantastic and the peculiar. It grows out of an interest in animals, myth, and the human tendency to anthropomorphize.

No description available.

This poetry manuscript tells the story of a family dealing with betrayal, loss, and aging.

No description available.

I went into the wilderness and I found Alec Baldwin. This is not a lie. It is also a title for a video installation and this thesis. In it, I investigate three separate adventure-performances, providing a theoretical context for their existence, meaning, and relationship as a form of artistic practice. I call this practice ‘adventure-art’, using the term to describe a performance-based action in which the artist publically explores his or her reality through some type of physical adventure, search, quest, or challenge. It is an attempt to engage oneself and others at both at the physical and mediated levels, reconciling, confusing, and merging the real with the simulated. In this thesis, I explore the confluence of consumption, creativity, the real, and the simulated within American popular culture from the perspective of a middle-class, suburban, white-male, art student – me, Steve Snell.

This paper will discuss the creation of my artwork, which has been inspired by my experiences and understandings of Catholicism and its icons. I will consider how iconography works in art, its influence, and how and why I have created this artwork dealing with my beliefs. I will also refer to the works of contemporary artists Duane Michals and Michael Wesely to help explain my exhibition, which I have titled "Doubting Thomas: The Testaments."